A Small, Additional, Added on Life Speaking. Remarks on...

L’homme est indestructible, et cela signifie qu’il n’y pas de limite à sa destructionMaurice Blanchot2

…and the commandment, which was ordained to bring life, I found to be unto death.Saint Paul (Romans 7: 10)

The core idea of Giorgio Abamben’s political philosophy, as developed in HomoSacer – in the book as well as in the larger project of that name3 – is well known.It is an inquiry into the logic of sovereignty which, according to Agamben, rulesthe entire political thought of the West, from politics in Antiquity to modern andpost-modern bio-politics. That logic implies the ever present possibility of a re-duction of the political subject to “bare life”, to the position of “homo sacer” who“can be killed but not sacrificed”. Even language as such is secretly ruled by thatlogic, Agamben several times adds. Even our daily speaking is virtually able to re-duce us to the position of “bare life”, of “homo sacer”. If in this essay, I go intothe passages in Homo Sacer that treat about language, it is because, there, Agam-ben’s thesis shows its most radical – if not to say untenable – shape. These pas-

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Marc De Kesel*

A Small, Additional, Added – on Life Speaking. Remarks on the Vitalism in Giorgio Agamben'sCritical Theory1

1 A first draft of this essay has been presented at the IPS (International Philosophical Seminar),“Reading Agamben, Homo Sacer”, Kastelruth (Italy), 28.06 – 07.07.2009.2 M. Blanchot, L’entretien infini 200, quoted in: Agamben, Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz, p. 1463 Homo Sacer, indeed, is the title, not only of one book, but of a still unfinished series of books,including Homo Sacer (I) (1995), State of Exception (II,1) (2003), Le reigne et la gloire (II,2) (2007),Remnants of Auschwitz (III) (1998) and a fifth volume (part IV) – the “pars construens” of theproject – which is still to be written. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and BareLife, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 [abbrevia-tion HS]); The State of Exception, translated by Kevin Attell (Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress, 2005); Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, (New York: Zone Books,2002); Le règne et la gloire, Homo Sacer, II,2, traduit par Joël Gayraud & Martin Rueff, (Paris:Seuil, 2008).

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sages also compel us to reconsider the theory of the subject, implied in Agam-ben’s “logic of sovereignty”. For Agamben, to be subjected to the logic of sover-eignty implies a desubjectivation or, what amounts to the same thing, anexclusion of the subject. At least, this is what Agamben states in Homo Sacer (thebook). In Remnants of Auschwitz, however, he adds that this desubjectivation, al-though ruled by the logic of sovereignty, nonetheless hides a possibility of es-caping that very logic. There he explains how, as witness, the victim implies apositive subject definition. Again, a reflexion on language and on subject theorywill be at the core of his reflexion. If, in my comments on this aspect of Agam-benian thought, I make a comparison with the language and subject theory ofJacques Lacan, it is mainly to clarify the vitalistic presuppositions underlyingAgamben’s theory of the subject.

1. Inclusive exclusion

According to Michel Foucault, the logic of sovereignty characterizes the ancient,medieval and early modern way to legitimize political power. Power, then, wasthe power over a territory, the power to take possession and to levy toll from peo-ple, the power symbolized by death since it allowed itself to take people’s life.4

In the late 18th and early 19th century, things changed. Power, then, becomespower over a population, power founded in the wealth of the population’s eco-nomic capacity, power legitimizing itself by managing the care for that wealth.This new kind of power is not symbolized by death but by life, since the popu-lation’s life is now political power’s main concern. Life – the life of the people –becomes the very raison d’être of political power. Politics became basically bio-politics. This, however, is not to say that power turns more positive or humane.It only means, thus Foucault, that the strategies of power change. The ‘micromechanisms of power’ only become more subtle, more secret and concealed, butnot less effective.

Agamben agrees with Foucault, except about the idea that the paradigm of sov-ereignty should have been left behind and replaced by the one of bio-politics.Unlike Foucault, Agamben sees the sovereign paradigm still fully operativewithin our bio-political age. One of his arguments is that, in politics, the appeal

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4 Michel Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, Population, Cours au Collège de France, 1977-1978 (Paris:Gallimard, 2004).


to the state of exception has only increased during the last century. Carl Schmitt’semphasis on this term as defining the characteristic property of politics as suchis only one of the signs pointing in that direction. Put in a situation threateningits foundation, any (bio)political power has to appeal on the state of exception.Not only the persistence of war in the bio-political 20th century gives evidence ofthis, the proliferation and persistence of camps during that century point in thesame direction. The state’s ultimate power over people’s live is shown in theclearest way where that state gathers people – illegal immigrants and “sans pa-piers” for instance – in a camp being entirely left, not to the laws of that state(since they are not citizens of that state), but to the grace of its sovereign power,a power that, in that case, indifferently, can decide about their lives, also in thenegative sense. Founded in itself, the state remains founded in the sovereign de-cision about who is inside and who is outside. Virtually, once threatened (or feel-ing threatened), the state can act against all its citizens as a threat from outside,as an enemy to be eliminated. So, even the state’s intention to care for its peopleis in fact based in the possibility to eliminate them. The state of exception is thereal paradigm of its rules.

Behind that ‘state of exception’ paradigm, the old logic of sovereignty keeps onruling, a logic that defines power as the power rather to take life than to takecare of it (as all kinds of bio-political power legitimizations claim). It is, moreprecisely, the power to exclude people from the public life, from life as shaped byits social/political condition, i.e. from βιος (bios) in the sense Aristotle gave tothe ancient Greek term for human, social life. Sovereign power is the power that,indifferently, can let people in or out the realm of the “bios”. It is the power tosorvereingly reduce or not people to ζοη (zoè), mere natural live, “bare life”.

Crucial is that, for Agamben, “bare life” is not simply natural life, as Aristotlestates. If someone’s life is reduced to its “bare” condition, it is not because it hasbecome simply natural. On the contrary, “la nuda vita” is the result of a politicaldecision, more precisely of an exclusion. It is an exclusion from “bios”, from po-litical life. And that exclusion shows the fully sovereign nature of that politicaldecision – and of political power in general. For, even if excluded, someone isstill completely at the mercy of that power. In other words, the exclusion is an in-clusive one. The most fundamental structure of sovereign power is to be definedas “esclusione inclusiva”, an inclusive exclusion.

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Agamben discerns that structure in the oldest forms of political power. For in-stance in one of Ancient Rome’s most severe sanctions, the “sacer esto” curse. Itis an excommunication excluding the malefactor from both the profane and thesacred order. Anyone is allowed to kill him unpunished, but nobody is allowedto sacrifice him (HS: 8; 71). Expelled from the human world, the “homo sacer” isdedicated to the gods and, in that sense “sacred”. Expelled, however, even fromthe realm of religious practices, he cannot sacrificially be dedicated or offeredto the gods. That curse shows the limits of both the human and divine law. Andit shows as well how both laws sovereignly dominate their limits and, conse-quently, the beyond of these limits. Excluded from the human, the cursed male-factor remains subjected to that law – and thus, in his very exclusion, includedwithin the law’s field. Similarly, his exclusion from the religious power is notcontradictory to the fact that he is entirely included in the realm of divine power.

Political power over people is sovereign insofar as it dominates its own limitsand, thus, includes even the ones it excludes. It dominates the difference defin-ing its realm, i.e. the difference between who is inside and who is outside – whichin principle implies: between the living ones and the ones condemned to death.The space where power can decide sovereignly between who is to live and whois to die, is the genuine political space of sovereign power. It is a space markedby difference (inside/outside, life/death), but about which power decides indif-ferently, unbound by its own laws. And since it includes the excluded ‘outside’,the space of sovereign power is virtually infinite. As is its power as well.

Did this kind of sovereign power not disappear since, historically, the sovereignrulers – dukes, counts, kings and emperors – were kicked out from the politicalscene? Is the legitimization of political power not transferred now to the people,and more exactly to the population’s life? In other words, is bio-politically legit-imized and organized power not freed from the inclusively exclusive logic char-acteristic for political power founded in sovereignty?

On the contrary, Agamben emphasises. Since modern politics is explicitly basedin life, its power has to master life’s boundaries and, thus, what is beyond thoseboundaries. The basic procedure underlying the political space it generates aswell as its power, is still the “ban”, i.e. the inclusive exclusion by which it createsand regulates limitlessly its own limits (HS: 28-29; 49-50). Like the Roman polit-ical space once created its space where it decided about its outside (i.e. about

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the space of the homo sacer), modern politics creates a similar place: the camp.Concentration camps, camps for refugees, for illegal immigrant, for sans-papiers,for those suspected of terrorism, et cetera: there, the political power shows theparadigm of its rule, i.e. the state of exception, that allows it to sovereignly de-cide who is in and who is out. In a globalized world, supposing the boundariesbetween countries overcome by the universal human rights each “world citizen”possesses, the paradigm of political powers comes to light where people whoonly possess those “human rights” are enclosed behind the barbed wire of acamp being delivered to the mercy of sovereign decisions.

If modern biopolitics is still ruled by the logic of sovereignty, then, also ancientsovereign power always has been biopolitical. Agamben refers to Aristotle who,in order to define the life of the city (πολις, polis) distinguishes good life (ευ ζην,eu zèn) from (mere, bare) life (ζην, zèn). Here already, at the very beginning ofWestern political history, bare life is excluded from – and, as excluded, includedin – “bios” (βιος), the life as occurring in - and regulated by – the city (πολις,polis). “What is the relation between politics and life, if life presents itself as whatis included by means of exclusion?” (HS: 7) This “bio-political” question par ex-cellence secretly dominates the entire political thought of the West, without everbeing put on the agenda in all clarity. Agamben’s larger Homo Sacer project is anattempt to rethink the political proceeding from that very question.

2. Language, …

In the context of the quote just cited, Agamben’s Homo Sacer (the book) men-tions a first time of the formal parallel between the logic of both politics and lan-guage. Commenting a passage from Aristotle’s Politica, Agamen writes:

It is not by chance, then, that a passage of the Politics situates the proper place of thepolis in the transition from voice to language. […] The question: “In what way doesthe living being have language?” corresponds exactly to the question ‘In what waydoes bare life dwell in the polis?” The living being has logos by taking away and con-serving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life beexcluded, as an exception, within it. […] In the “politicization” of bare life – the meta-physical task par excellence – the humanity of living man is decided. In assuming thistask, modernity does nothing other than declare its own faithfulness to the essentialstructure of the metaphysical tradition. The fundamental categorical pair of Western

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politics is not that of friend / enemy, but that of bare life / political existence, zoè /bios, exclusion / inclusion. (HS 7-8)

In order to become a citizen, man has to give up the singularity of his voice andto subject himself to the discourse of the city, to the “political” language, the“logos”. The “voice” as the “sign of pain and pleasure”, the voice speaking of alife’s singularity is supposed to be not compatible with the “logos”, i.e. with whatis “manifesting the fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust”5. Only,and this is the crucial point in Agamben’s analysis, this non-compatibility is adeclaration done by the logos, by the logic ruling the city/polis. The “logos” ex-cludes the voice of non-political life and, in the same gesture, includes it in itsrealm. It is a way to declare the voice to be bare life, i.e. to be subjected to a sov-ereign power that, indifferently, decides whether it may live or must die. The dif-ference laying at the base of politics is not the one between friend and enemy, adifference on the level of attitude, as Carl Schmitt’s central thesis claims6, butthe difference between political and bare life, between bios and zoè, a differencewhich already operates on the level of speaking, of the “logos” people share withone another. So, already on the level of language (logos), the logic of sovereigntyoperating by the paradigm of inclusive exclusion is overpowering.

A few pages further, Agamben’s thesis on language sounds still more radical andprovocative. Referring to Hegel’s theory of language in the Phenomenology of theSpirit, he writes:

We have seen that only the sovereign decision on the state of exception opens thespace in which it is possible to trace borders between inside and outside and in whichdeterminate rules can be assigned to determinate territories. In exactly the same way,only language as pure potentiality to signify, withdrawing itself from every concreteinstance of speech, divides the linguistic from the non-linguistic and allows for theopening of areas of meaningful speech in which certain terms correspond to certaindenotations. Language is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of exception, de-clares that there is nothing outside language and that language is always beyond it-self. The particular structure of law has its foundation in this presuppositional

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5 Quotes from the passage Agamben cites from Aristotle’s Politica (1253 a 10-18) (HS 7-8). 6 Carl Schmitt The Concept of the Political, translated by George Schwab, foreword by Tracy B.Strong, commentary by Leo Strauss, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996).


structure of human language. It expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion to which athing is subject because of the fact of being in language, of being named. To speak is,in this sense, always to “speak the law”, ius dicere. (HS 21)

The context reflects on the validity of legal norms, telling this cannot be tracedback to their applicability in concrete cases. Norms need a legitimacy on theirown, independent from all applicability and referring to a merely sovereign in-stance. Which they have. This is what decisions made in cases of exception makeclear. Then, it becomes obvious that, on the most fundamental level, legal normsfunction by reference to the authority of a self-made sovereign law. Similarly,language cannot be traced back to its applicability in concrete situations. Wordscan only designate concrete things insofar they have a meaning on their own, in-dependent from their designating function. In the last resort (which becomesobvious in states of exceptions), it is language that decides about the sense ofthings, not the things themselves. The things’ bare existence is first excludedfrom language and, in that very quality, at the same time included within lan-guage’s realm. The sense of things is only based in that “second” moment. This,indeed, shows language’s sovereign power, organising a never ending “state ofexception” with regard to bare reality. “Language is the sovereign who, in a per-manent state of exception, declares that there is nothing outside language andthat language is always beyond itself.” So, that there is nothing outside of lan-guage is not a simple observation. It tells that language sovereignly decides aboutwhat is outside or inside. When Hegel states that “language […] is the perfect el-ement in which interiority is as external as exteriority is internal” (as quoted onp. 21), he does not describe the situation of language as it is, but of how it acts,of its activated capacity, i.e. of its power to decide whether something “is” or “isnot”, whether something/someone is given life or not. Being subjected to lan-guage, all things are virtually its victims. To speak equals “to speak the law” andto be condemned by that law.

In the fourth paragraph of Part 1, Agamben develops another reference to lan-guage. The passage is on Kafka’s famous short story “Before the Law” which, ashe says, is an excellent illustration of the Law that, being explicitly not appliedto any concrete case, shows the sovereign logic it is ruled by. For, precisely, the“man from the country” is not in the Law’s realm, he is outside. From that out-side position he intends to enter it – an entrance which seems even facilitated bythe open door leading to it, and by a guard who promises to do nothing if one

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walks through that door. At the end of the story we learn that precisely this opendoor was the man of the country’s personal obstacle that has kept him for everexcluded from the Law’s domain. “The open door destined only for him includeshim in excluding him and excludes him in including him”, Agamben writes (HS50). In other words, Kafka’s story reveals the logic of the “ban” underlying the re-lation between the Law and its subject. In an additional paragraph, Agambencontinues:

In an analogous fashion, language also holds man in its ban insofar as man, as speak-ing being, has always already entered into language, without noticing it. Everythingthat is presupposed for there to be language (in its forms of something non-linguistic,something ineffable, etc.) is nothing other than a presupposition of language that ismaintained as such in relation to language precisely insofar as it is excluded from lan-guage. […] As the pure form of relation, language (like the sovereign ban) always al-ready presupposes itself in the figure of something nonrelational, and it is not possibleeither to enter into relation or to move out of relation with what belongs to the formof relation itself. This means not that the non-linguistic is inaccessible to man but sim-ply that man can never reach it in the form of a nonrelational and ineffable presup-position, since the non-linguistic is only ever to be found in language itself. (HS: 50)

The previous quote said that the ground upon which language rests is language’sown construction, its product or supposition excluding/including bare reality.This quote is even more provocative, telling explicitly that this logic goes also forthe subject of language, for the one making use of it. Contrary to what we sup-pose, we do not precede the language we use in order to talk about ourselves.We are ourselves a supposition made by the sovereign language we use – or, moreexactly, that makes use of us.

It is not man who holds language in its ban, it is language that “holds man in itsban”. Enabling us to relate to others and to ourselves, language operates in a log-ical form inclusively excluding us and, thus, reducing us to “bare life” aboutwhich can be decided indifferently, sovereignly. The mere logic of our speakingmight reduce us to the possibility to become “bare life” living by the grace of lan-guage that decides sovereignly whether we are in or out its realm, in or out thelife that lives thanks to language’s sovereign grace. Relating to people (includinghimself) in and through language, man is subjected to that language as to an au-tonomously operating Relation, a kind of transcendental “relationality” to which

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he cannot relate (in this sense, it is “nonrelational”), while it makes all his rela-tions possible. To that “condition of possibility” man is subjected as to a Law –a Law that owes its ground, sense and meaning only to itself and whose logic isthe one of sovereignty, so Agamben stresses. That Law is to be defined as “Gel-tung ohne Bedeutung”, “being in force without significance”, thus Agamben,quoting Gershem Scholem’s comment of Kafka’s short story (HS 51):

Nothing better describes the ban that our age cannot master than Scholem’s formulafor the status of law in Kafka’s novel. What, after all, is the structure of the sovereignban if not that of a law that is in force but does not signify? Everywhere on earth menlive today in the ban of a law and a tradition that are maintained solely as the “zeropoint” of their own content, and that include men within them in the form of a purerelation of abandonment. All societies and all cultures today (it does not matterwhether they are democratic or totalitarian, conservative or progressive) have enteredinto a legitimation crisis in which law (we mean by this term the entire text of tradi-tion in its regulative form, whether the Jewish Torah or the Islamic Shariah, Christiandogma or the profane nomos) is in force as the pure “Nothing of Revelation”. But thisis precisely the structure of the sovereign relation, and the nihilism in which we areliving is, from this perspective, nothing than the coming to light of this relation assuch. (HS 51)

So, man’s position vis-à-vis language is but an illustration of the one vis-à-vis theentire tradition and culture ruled by the logic of sovereignty. Although we thinkthat, since modernity, it is up to us to decide about the sense of our tradition andculture, it is in fact still the other way round. And, what is more: if tradition andculture do decide about the sense of our existence, it is not because they rest ona more solid ground or have a firmer legitimation than we do. On the contrary,they are founded in “Nothing” and illustrate strikingly modernity’s nihilism. Butstill they hold man in their ban. Whatever the content of tradition and culturemight be, they relate to man with the logic of sovereignty. Supposing himself to bea free subject having control over tradition and culture and using it for the bene-fit of his and others’ life (as is the case under biopolitical conditions), he is alwaysalready trapped in a logic that virtually reduces him to a victim subjected to thecapriciousness of a sovereign power. Tradition, culture, politics, and even lan-guage as such might be groundless, they are still ruled by the logic of sovereignty,excluding man from their domain in order to include him in it as excluded, as barelife, as the one about whom, indifferently, any decision can be taken.

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In spite of what modernity claims, we have not become free, independent andself-grounding subjects. On the contrary, the old theory of the subject is stillhighly valid. We are still first of all subjected to a law, and that law is ruled by theold logic of sovereignty, reducing us virtually all to a radically “de-subjectivised”“bare life”, to the life of a homo sacer, a life that can be killed but not sacrificed,a life delivered to the deadly grace of an indifferent, sovereign decision.

3. … and representation in general

So far the theory of the subject Agamben criticizes in his Homo sacer and in manyother of his books. The subject involved in Western thought is not the “free actor”as liberal democracy likes to believe. It is rather an “object” subjected to an in-dependent, sovereign law reducing man to an included exclusion. Even his lan-guage puts him in that includedly excluded position. In Agamben, there is nomention of it, but in fact that theory of the subject is quite near to that other fa-mous/infamous one elaborated by Jacques Lacan between the fifties and the sev-enties. Certainly when one takes into account the passages in Homo Sacer onlanguage, the similarity is striking.

For Lacan the subject is to be defined as subject of – and, thus, subjected to – lan-guage. Put in psychoanalytical terms, this means that, unable to obtain pleasuredirectly from the real, the libidinal infans has to get it from the others with whomit identifies. In order to get an identity, the child more precisely identifies withthe “one” the others talk about. It supposes itself to be the subject of their talk.Initially the infans understands not one of the signifiers they utter, but even thenit knows itself to be the “signified” of those signifiers. This lays the foundationfor the “subject” it will remain during its entire life. In a first time, the infans sup-poses itself to be the full meaning of the incomprehensible signifiers uttered bythe others (this is the ground for the imaginary Ego). In a second time, it holdsitself exclusively to signifiers, which keeps him infinitely referring to other sig-nifiers, thus becoming the subject – bearer, support, in Greek “hupokeimenon”,in Latin “subjectum” – of a desire. It becomes the subject of a never ending long-ing for full identity or complete satisfaction.

So, according to Lacan too, language “holds man in its ban insofar as man, asspeaking being, has always already entered into language, without noticing it”.This quote from Agamben expresses strikingly the core of the Lacanian theory of

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the subject. Forced to be what underlies his desire, the subject is entirely relyingon language, on signifiers. Or, as Lacan puts it, the subject is “what a signifierrepresents to another signifier”.7 This means that the libidinal being – as bare life– is by definition excluded from the order that represents (and solely represents)it. The only life it is given is one within the realm representing that life (and, thus,excluding life “as such”, “bare life”). The (symbolic) realm in which the libidi-nal being has to realise itself as a self or an identity, excludes that being, and, byimplication, includes it. The “bare” or “real” side of that being is for ever “cas-trated” from the order in which it lives its life as mere representation. This iswhat the Lacanian notion of “symbolic castration” is about. And it matches per-fectly with the theory of the subject Agamben discovers in the entire tradition ofwestern thought.

Only, for Agamben this theory of the subject illustrates the evil logic at work inwestern politics and in thought in general. If, also for Lacan, this logic is not nec-essarily the logic of the good, it is however definitely not the one of evil. It is atragic logic defining things as they are; defining what, in things, cannot bechanged. If change is needed, it will occur within the boundaries drawn by thattragic logic. It is within the logic of inclusive exclusion that we have to work onjustice for today’s biopolitics. The universe in which modernity operates is oneof “Geltung ohne Bedeutung”, “being in force without significance”: a nihilisticuniverse lacking any real ground and entirely replaced by representation, i.e. byan independent realm of signifiers which, as such, have no meaning and, there-fore, in full sovereignty can allow any meaning. Unlike Lacan, Agamben con-siders this paradigmatic way of dealing with the world as the source of aprofound evil. The analysis he makes of it aims at a radically different thoughtand politics. In his eyes, the logic of representation is a logic of sovereignty and,for that reason, not simply tragic but evil – which is why it has to be demolishedand replaced by a better one. Agamben’s paradigmatic enquiry is a contributionto that.

Here, I think, we face the main target of Agamben’s criticism: the logic of repre-sentation. As soon as something is presented as something, “as such” for in-

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7 Lacan’s definition of the signifier in seminar IX is in fact a concealed definition of the signi-fier: “the signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier”. Jacques Lacan, SeminarIX, L’identification, 1961-62, the lesson of 6 december 1961, unpublished.


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stance, it is involved in a logic of representation and of difference, introducing anincurable split in the thing itself. Intending to grasp the thing as such, one splitsoff the bare thing, thus creating a zone over which a sovereign decision can betaken. Representing things as (whatever) they are is impossible without splittingoff a rest, and installing a zone of sovereign power. At the end of Homo Sacer, inthe last “Threshold”, Agamben writes:

In the syntagm “bare life” bare corresponds to the Greek haplōs, the term by which firstphilosophy defines pure Being. The isolation of the sphere of pure being, which con-stitutes the fundamental activity of Western metaphysics, is not without analogieswith the isolation of bare life in the realm of Western politics. What constitutes manas a thinking animal has its exact counterpart in what constitutes him as political an-imal. In the first case, the problem is to isolate Being (on haplōs) from the many mean-ings of the term “Being” (which according to Aristotle, “is said in many ways”); in thesecond, what is at stake is the separation of bare life from the many forms of concretelife. Pure Being, bare life – what is contained in these two concepts, such that both themetaphysics and the politics of the West find their foundation and sense in them andin them alone? What is the link between the two constitutive processes by which meta-physics and politics seem, in isolating their proper element, simultaneously to run upagainst an unthinkable limit? For bare life is certainly as indeterminate and impene-trable as haplōs Being, and one could say that reason cannot think bare life except asit thinks pure Being, in stupor and in astonishment […]. (HS 182)

What is supposed to be Being as Being, Being as such, is in fact the result of a de-cision about Being’s borderline, about its “unthinkable limit”. Unthinkable, in-deed, because there, without ground or reason, without argument, is decidedabout what is inside and what is outside Being, about what is and what is not.The outside and the non-existence are excluded and, as excluded, show thatBeing has power over the whole of what is, including even what is not, evenBeing’s outside. As is the case in politics, excluding the homo sacer, sovereigntyreveals its power to include everyone, even the excluded. Thinking of Being asBeing, and thinking of the polis as polis (as being sovereignly itself) – or, whichamounts to the same thing, ontology and politics – suppose both a decisionabout an “unthinkable limit” excluding what is beyond that limit and, by sodoing, definitely including it. This is to say that ontological thinking, in a way,supposes a political decision, a decision as lays at the basis of the typically po-litical logic of sovereignty, a decision supposing an indeterminate zone where

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the difference between inside and outside or life and death, only depends on thesovereign capriciousness of power.

4. Vitalist Ontology

So, is pure ontology – ontology kept unspoiled from any politics – not the rem-edy against the ruses of the logic of sovereignty? To find a way out of the im-passes of that logic, should we not strictly separate political thinking fromgeneral ontological thought? To avoid the dangerous indeterminateness of rep-resentationalist concepts, in case “bare life” and “Being”, should we not removethe political from the ontological? In the paragraph following the one citedabove, Agamben suggests the opposite:

Yet precisely these two empty and indeterminate concepts seem to safeguard the keysto the historico-political destiny of the West. And it may be that only if we are able todecipher the political meaning of pure Being will we be able to master the bare life thatexpresses our subjection to political power, just as it may be, inversely, that only if weunderstand the theoretical implications of bare life will we be able to solve the enigmaof ontology. Brought to the limit of pure Being, metaphysics (thought) passes into pol-itics (into reality), just as on the threshold of bare life, politics steps beyond itself intotheory. (HS 182)

We need ontology to understand what is going on in politics, just as inquiries inthe political are indispensible to “solve the enigma of ontology”. For Agamben,the opposition to be made is not the one between ontological and politicalthought, but between representationalist and ontological thinking. To avoid thetraps of representationalist thinking, to avoid thinking based on the inclusiveexclusion of “bare life” and/or pure Being, we need an affirmative thought aboutbare life and being. We need ontology. A vitalist ontology.

For in being, conceived as life, and even in “bare life”, there is potentiality of re-sistance, able to make the sovereign look a fool. A few pages further in the last“Threshold” of Homo Sacer, Agamben gives a description of the “Muselmann”,the one in the Nazi concentration camps who illustrates the situation of bare lifein the most extreme way. Radically excluded, his bare life still has the capacityto shock the executioner:

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Antelme tells us that the camp habitant was no longer capable of distinguishing be-tween pangs of cold and the ferocity of the SS. If we apply this statement to the Musel-mann quite literally (“the cold, SS”), then we can say that he moves in an absoluteindistinction of fact and law, of life and juridical rule, and of nature and politics. Be-cause of this, the guard seems suddenly powerless before him, as if struck by thethought that the Muselmann’s behavior – which does not register any difference be-tween an order and the cold – might perhaps be a silent form of resistance. Here alaw that seeks to transform itself entirely into life finds itself confronted with a lifethat is absolutely indistinguishable from law, and it is precisely this indescernibilitythat threatens the lex animata of the camp. (HS 185)

The acme of biopolitics is the nazi’s supposition that, by exterminating the Jews,the gypsies, and other “racial” minorities, they were simply assisting the workof Nature. The only law they imposed on those people, so they believed, was thelaw of natural life, a law as animated by and coinciding with life itself (which isthe meaning of lex animate, see HS 183). But that “life itself” meets “itself” in thebare life, in the life excluded from it, in a life that, be it in its own way, is beyondthe distinction between law and life, in this case, between order and cold, SSand nature. In the bare life of the Muselmann, the executioner might suddenlysee what the “full life” he is promoting is about. The victim’s bare life has thepotential to finally mirror the life served by the executioner in a true way. Thelack of distinction between the cold and the SS might show the latter his ownlack of distinction (between fact and law). It might show him the zone of indif-ference created by the sovereign logic of his power. The bare life is able to mir-ror the sovereign and tell him the truth of his own position, the logic of inclusiveexclusion he himself is virtually victim of as well.

Life, even bare life, can serve as a weapon against sovereign politics. Ontology hasthe potential to resist representationalist logic and its catastrophes. As numerousare the passages in Agamben where he announces ontological thought to providethe alternative to the logic of sovereignty, as rare are the ones where he extensivelyelaborates that idea. He once will do this, so he promises, in the Part IV of the HomoSacer Project, the “pars construens” in contrast to the “pars destruens”, i.e. theother deconstructing parts elaborating his criticism of sovereign logic.8 Some of

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8 Lieven De Cauter quotes from an e-mail Agamben wrote him on November 4, 2003 and inwhich, talking about the entire Homo sacer project, he states that “the final and fourth section


the announcing passages, however, give us already a first insight in the frame-work of the ontological alternative he proposes.

So does “Forma-di-vita”, “Form-of-life”, a short essay from 1993 that announcesa lot of themes elaborated in Homo Sacer published two years later.9 In a way, allis already in the title, both the evil and its solution. The basic “mistake” in West-ern thought, the logical source of its disastrous (bio)politics, lays in the fact thatlife has given a form. Just like he does in the introduction of Homo Sacer, here,Agamben refers to the distinction Aristotle makes between ζοη (zoè) and βιος

(bios). Zoè, natural life has been given a political form, bios. As we know already,the logic of this form-giving is ruled by an inclusive exclusion procedure givingroom to a sovereign domination on the difference zoè/bios, i.e. to a power of de-ciding indifferently on life and death.

And what is the alternative for that disastrous form of life? “Form-of-life”, i.e. ahyphenated “forma-di-vita”. The remedy is a matter of hyphen, so to say.10 On thefirst page of his essay, after a short evocation of the zoè/bios distinction, Agam-ben writes:

By the term form-of-life […], I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, alife in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life. […] It definesa life – human life – in which the single ways, acts and processes of living are neversimply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power[potenza]11. Each behavior and each form of human living is never prescribed by a spe-

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will contain the pars construens of the work, on form of life”; Lieven De Cauter, De capsulairebe schaving. Over de stad in het tijdperk van de angst (Rotterdam: NAi Uitgevers, 2005), p. 177,note 4.9 Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, translated by Vicenzo Binetti and Ce-sare Casarino (Mineapolis & London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000 [abbreviationMWE]), pp. 3-12. In La règne et la gloire, Agamben he explicitly calls “la quatrième partie de larecherche [Homo sacer] consacrée à la forme de vie »; Giorgio Agamben, Le règne et la gloire –Homo sacer, II, 2 (Paris: Seuil, 2008), p. 14.10 Agamben himself pays explicitly attention to the hyphen (“le plus énigmatique des signe depunctuation dans la mesure où il n’unit que parce qu’il disingue, et vice versa”) in his essay onDeleuze. Giorgio Agamben, “L’immanence absolue”, in: Erik Allier (réd.), Gilles Deleuze. Une viephilosophique (Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthélabo, 1998), p. 167.11 “Potenza” (in French “puissance”, in German “Vermögen”) is to be distinguished from“potere” (in French “pouvoir”, in German “Macht”). “Potenza” is the term for the vital potencyof life force, “potere” is rather reserved for institutionalised power.


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cific biological vocation, or is it assigned by whatever necessity; instead, no matterhow costumary, repeated, and socially compulsory, it always retains the character ofa possibility; it always puts at stake living itself. (MWE 4)

Form-of-life is not a form given to life from the outside, referring to a kind of tran-scendental “model” or “representation”, imposing itself to the living thing as aLaw. It is not a form as the result of a “force of law”, of a “non-relational” Rela-tion that precedes life and mediates its forms (as mentioned above a quote fromHS 50). Form-of-life, hyphenated, is a form inherent to life itself, a “form” not tobe considered as a passive model, but as an active forming potency (potenza). Aform as infinite capacity to formation; a form not to be limited to what life bio-logically needs, but to be considered as life’s infinite possibility to change, tomodify life and to create new life. Life, never as a given fact, but always as a vitaland inexhaustible possibility, as a possibility of ever new possibilities, or, in thewords of Agamben here, as what always “puts at stake living itself”.

The Aristotelian difference between ζην (zèn, natural life) and ευ ζην (eu zèn,good, happy life, typical for human beings) is to be read in that sense. Which isto say that the same vital creativity characterizes not only the human individ-ual, but also the human community and the political in general. Or, as Agambenwrites in the lines directly following the quote above:

This is why human beings – as beings of power [potenza] who can do or not do, suc-ceed or fail, lose themselves or find themselves – are the only beings for whom hap-piness is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose life is irremediably andpainfully assigned to happiness. But this immediately constitutes the form-of-life aspolitical life. (MWE 4)

The difference involved here is not the one between life and form, but the dif-ference at work within life itself, provoking incessantly new forms-of-live. Thatdifference, that active form-of-life, cannot be traced back by classical – i.e. rep-resentationalist – thinking. Contrary to what representationalist logic pretends,thought is not a matter of abstracting forms from life in order to use them forother representations of life. Agamben coins a new definition of thinking:

I call thought the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context asform-of-life. […] To think does not mean merely to be affected by this or that thing, by

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this or that content of enacted thought, but rather at once to be affected by one’s ownreceptiveness and experience in each and every thing that is thought as a pure power[potenza] of thinking. […] Only if I am not always already and solely enacted, butrather delivered to a possibility and a power [potenza], only if living and intendingand apprehending themselves are at stake each time in what I live and intend and ap-prehend – only if, in other words, there is thought – only then can a form of life be-come, in its own factness and thingness, form-of-life, in which it is never possible toisolate something like naked life. MWE 9

The act of thinking is, first, to be defined as being affected by the “potenza” of thething thought about, and, secondly, as being affected by the inner “potenza” ofmy receptivity. Even my passive reception is active, has “potenza” going beyondwhat is actualized of it in my particular reception. Agamben uses Aristotle’s termsto stress the primacy of thought’s potentiality over what it actually thinks – or,what amounts to the same thing, the primacy of the potentiality of experience overwhat actually is experienced. Fully actualized, thinking always has potency in“rest”, in reserve. And it is the same kind of rest or reserve that reshapes again andagain the form a living being has. It is in that sense that thinking has access to theform-of-life (hyphenated), and that “thought [is] the nexus that constitutes theforms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life”. In that sense, too, “com-munity and power [potenza] identify one with the other” (MWE 10).12

In Agamben’s reflection on the logic of sovereignty and its alternative, a broaderdebate in current continental philosophy is involved, a debate about whether ornot we can/must get beyond the paradigm of representation. On the one hand,there are those who strictly hold on the Kantian caesura, saying that any onto-logically based thought – a thought based in Being or reality as such – has be-come impossible and that we have to stick to representations. 20th centurylinguistic turn in continental philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, de-construction and other discourse theories have made this line very strong (Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Barth, Derrida). On the other hand, there is an opposite andjust as strong line gathering philosophers like Deleuze, Guattari, Hardt and Negriwho, following the line of Leibniz and Bergson, take up the ontological and vi-

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12 “Among beings who would always already be enacted, who would always already be this orthat thing, this or that identity, and who would have entirely exhausted their power [potenza]in these things and identities – among such beings there could not be any community but onlycoincidences and factual partitions.” (MWE 10)


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talistic thought. Like the ones from the first line, they too emphasise difference,but for them, that difference is an ontological one, a difference inherent to being,to reality as such. Reality is difference and multiplicity and, here, the word “is”should be taken in its full ontological sense.

In the critical part of his oeuvre, Agamben embraces the tools of that representa-tionalist tradition, using them to analyse the hidden logic behind Western thought.That kind of criticism is characteristic for that tradition, aware as it is of the dan-gerous ruses inherent to representationalist logic. Only, their criticism is not basedupon the supposition that a radically different logical paradigm is possible. The al-ternatives they propose still accept the representationalist paradigms.

On this point Agamben quits the line of representationalist thought and puts for-ward the other, ontological line. For, in his eyes, only a proper ontologicalthought can deliver us from the evils caused by representationalist logic. This iswhy “life”, in its quality of being the foundation of politics and thought, is notonly the object of criticism, that what is criticized. It is at the same time a posi-tive concept that, at distance, is guiding all critical analyses. The way the Westalways has founded politics in life is wrong, but the right foundation of the pol-itics to come will do the same, be it on the right way. Life, and nothing else thanlife, once might save us from the “bare life” the ruling logic of sovereignty canreduce that life to.

5. Barely speaking, …

So, is “life” a concept capable of giving us hope in the age that has made – andstill makes – camps as Auschwitz possible? Is there hope after Auschwitz? Wasthere hope in Auschwitz? If for Agamben, there is and there was, then, it is be-cause of a “rest of Auschwitz”. Not only a “rest” left after Auschwitz, but first ofall a “rest” present in Auschwitz. What is that “rest”? It is what Auschwitz is fullof, although there was barely one to recognize it for what it was. So, what is that“rest”? “Bare life”, the life the Muselmänner lived, the life of the “undead”, de-prived of all that makes them human, a life that has changed living in merelysurviving, in vegetal, low profiled bare biological life, a life radically reduced toits sheer “élan vital”.13 At the end of chapter 4 in Remnants of Auschwitz, after

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13 In his essay on Deleuze, Agamben refers to a quote of Deleuze from Charles Dicken’s Our a


mentioning a few examples of metaphorical use of “survive”, he defines the termas “the pure and simple continuation of bare life with respect to truer and morehuman life” (RA 133). Which fits with what, in an earlier passage, quoting DesPres14, he had defined as the

small, additional, added-on life for which he [the survivor] is ready to pay the high-est price [and which] reveals itself in the end to be nothing other than the biologicallife as such, impenetrable “priority of the biological element”. (RA 92-93)

And how can such an “additional”, merely “surviving” life be a factor of resist-ance in Auschwitz? Not only as a possible mirror, in which the SS perpetratormight have the opportunity to see a life not sovereignly dominated by Law, a lifewhere Law and life are indistinguishable. Remember the quote above, fromHomo Sacer, about the Muselmann:

Here a law that seeks to transform itself entirely into life finds itself confronted witha life that is absolutely indistinguishable from law, and it is precisely this inde-scernibility that threatens the lex animata of the camp. (HS 185)

Needless to say that not much effect is to be expected from this vital “rest ofAuschwitz”, since it depends completely upon the willingness of the SS.

Yet, this “rest”, this “bare life” surviving in the death camps, has still another forceof resistance. It can bear witness. A “rest” of life survives already in Auschwitzand, therefore, can survive in the testimony of the survivors. Thus the basic line

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Mutual Friend, more precisely the story in which Riderhood nearly drowns. “t the last minute,a scoundrel, a bad subject despiced by all, is saved as he is dying, and at once all the peopletaking care of him show a kind of attention, respect, love for the dying man’s smallest signs oflife. Everyone tries to save him, to the point that in the deepest moment of his coma, the vil-lainous man feels that something sweet is reaching him. But the more he comes back to life, themore his saviours become cold, and rediscover his coarseness, his meanness. Between his lifeand his death there is a moment that is nothing other than that of a life playing with death. Thelife of the individual gives way to an impersonal yet singular life, a life that gives rise to a pureevent, freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, of the subjectivity and ob-jectivity of what happens. ‘Homo tantum’, for whom everyone feels and who attains a kind ofbeatitude.” Deleuze quoted in Agamben, Potentialities – Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans-lated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Standford: Standford University Press, 1999), pp. 228-229).14 Terence Des Pres, The survivor, An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: WSP, 1976).


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of Agamben’s theory of the witness, a theory that supplies some insight in Agam-ben’s own ontological theory of the subject.

For Agamben, the problem of bearing witness is indeed particularly intertwinedwith the one of the subject, to such an extent that it even shapes his definitionof the subject. Giving witness, so he writes in the third chapter of Remnants ofAuschwitz entitled “Shame, or about the subject”, is to be conceived as having al-ways two “subjects” involved: the Muselmann and the witness. “Testimony ”,Agamben writes, is

the impossible dialectic between the survivor and the Muselmann, the pseudo-witnessand the “complete witness”, the human and the non-human. Testimony appears hereas a process that involves at least two subjects: the first, the survivor, who can speakbut who has nothing interesting to say; and the second, who “has seen the Gorgone,”who “has touched bottom”, and therefore has much to say but cannot speak. Which ofthe two bears witness? Who is the subject of tesitmony? (RA 120; Agamben underlines)

“What is the subject of giving witness?” The question is not rhetorical. For the an-swer is neither the one Agamben, referring to Primo Levi, promotes as the “com-plete witness”, the Muselmann, nor the one actually giving witness, the survivor.The subject is not to be defined as a human being at all. If it often seems so, thenit is because that human being “by accident” occupies the place of the subjectand plays its part.

As many 20th century linguists and philosophers, Agamben conceives the sub-ject as the effect of that which it is subjected to, the effect of that of which it is thesubject/bearer. It is the point or platform that, paradoxically, is the product ofwhat occurs on that platform. This is so striking in the most provocative subjecttheories: like in the story of Baron Munchausen, who, on his horse and sinkingin the marshes15, draws himself out of the water by pulling (not even his hair but)his wig, the subject bears the whole process although being entirely the effect ofthat very process.

This is why the subject is never what, since Descartes, it is commonly supposedto be: the self-presence of a cogito, a firm ground able to doubt about the entire

MARC DE KESEL

15 See Marc De Kesel, The Munchausen Syndrome: Essays on/in Lacanian Theorie, to appear.


universe but doubtlessly sure about itself. A confrontation with the supposedCartesian subject will end up facing desubjectivation. So, desubjectivation is anessential part of many current subject theories, including Agamben’s. For thelatter, “subject” is what occurs between two poles: the supposed Cartesian firmsubject and the vanishing point of mere desubjectivation. The subject is in be-tween, in between identity and non-identity, or, as Agamben puts here, in be-tween “the human and the non-human”. Not as a point, but as process, as afluctuating power going back and forth between one pole and the other. Anddoes that process come down in a subject of consciousness? Desubjectivation assuch cannot be appropriated by consciousness. Yet, it can be the object of a tes-timony, that what a witness is about. And, more precisely, in that case it is its“subject”: that which witnesses in a testimony is in the end the desubjectivationpole, the non-identity, the “non-human”.

But this means that the one who truly bears witness in the human is the non-human.It means that the human is nothing other than the agent of the non-human, the onewho lends the inhuman a voice. Or, that there is no one who claims the title “witness”by right. To speak, to bear witness, is thus to enter into a vertiginous movement inwhich something sinks to the bottom, wholly desubjectified and silenced, and some-thing subjectified speaks without truly having anything to say of its own […]. Testi-mony takes place where the speechless one makes the speaking one speak, and wherethe one who speaks bears the impossibility of speaking in his own speech, such thatthe silent and speaking, the inhuman and the human enter in a zone of indistinctionin which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the “imag-ined substance” of the “I”, and, along with it, the true witness. This can be expressedby saying that the subject of testimony is the one who bears witness of the desubjecti-fication. But this expression holds if it is not forgotten that “to bear witness to a desub-jectification” can only mean that there is no subject of testimony […] and that everytestimony is a field of forces incessantly traversed by currents of subjectification anddesubjectification. (RA 120-121; Agamben underlines)

Giving witness of desubjectivation: this is what defines a subject. Which is to saythat there is no subject “in the proper sense”, in the sense of “property”, of fixedidentity. The subject of the witness is in the end its object, its impossible, inef-fable object, speaking through the voice of the survivor who constantly gets “de-centred” by what he has to say, oscillating incessantly between the two poles ofthe process of which he is the bearer/subject.

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6. … and its vitalist subject

In the following pages of Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben seeks for a theoreti-cal background to support his theory of the subject. The one he mentions first isby Émile Benveniste, claiming that “the foundation of subjectivity is in the prac-tice of language” (cited in RA 128).16 Only by speaking, the infans becomes a“human” subject. Subjectivity and conscience “rest in what is most precariousand fragile in the world: the event of speech” (RA 129). Which is to say that it hasto retake – and even re-invent – itself in every speaking act that sets in act lan-guage by getting lost in it.

There is more: the living being who has made himself absolutely present to himself inthe act of enunciation, in saying “I”, pushes his own lived experience back into a lim-itless past and can no longer coincide with them. The event of language in the purepresence of discourse irreparably divides the self-presence of sensations and experi-ences in the very moment in which it refers them to a unitary center. Whoever enjoysthe particular presence achieved in the intimate consciousness of the enunciatingvoice forever loses the pristine adhesion to the Open that Rilke discerned in the gazeof the animal; he must now return his eyes inward towards the non-place of lan-guage. This is why subjectification, the production of consciousness in the event ofdiscourse, is often a trauma of which human beings are not easily cured; this is whythe fragile text of consciousness incessantly crumbles and erases itself, bringing tolight the disjunction on which it is erected: the constitutive desubjecification in everysubjectification. (RA 122-123)

If, here, Agamben supposes “the living being” to be able “to be present to him-self”, (but on what ground, and how to conceive that presence to itself withoutconsciousness?), he immediately adds that, in an absolute way (which meanshere: in a way that allows to say “I”), he is only so once he is excluded from thatwhich makes presence-to-oneself possible at all, i.e. discourse, language. Pres-ence to itself, identity, subjectivity is only possible by excluding the animal side– sensations, bare living, bare live – and, in the same gesture, including it in the

MARC DE KESEL

16 “ […] le langage enseigne la définition de l’homme. […] C’est dans et par le language quel’homme se constitue comme sujet ; parce que le language seul fonde en réalité, dans sa réa-lité quie est celle de l’être, le concept d’ ‘ego’”. Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique gé-nérale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 259. Agamben refers to chapter XXI entitled : “De lasubjectivité dans le language” (pp. 258-266).


order of discourse and language. It is the tragic condition (it “is often a trauma”)characterizing human being, he concludes, repeating that desubjectification isa constitutive part of each subjectification and of the subject as such.

Although not mentioned by name, the logic here is definitely the one of inclusiveexclusion, defined in Homo Sacer I as the logic of sovereignty. However, whereasin Homo sacer that logic is described as source of Western biopolitical evil, inRemnants of Auschwitz it is characterized as tragic and “constitutive”. Desub-jectification proper to any subject simply phrases the human condition.

Once again, we are extremely close to that other theory of the subject I men-tioned earlier. What else is Lacan’s subject theory about? The Lacanian subjectis entirely the subject of language, excluding the real (i.e. any kind of “immedi-ate”, “bare” life) and therefore being totally integrated and included in the au-tonomously operating signifying system. The subject’s consciousness, i.e. its“absolute” presence to itself, is only possible under the condition of absolutealienation in language. In Lacan, the subject is not a fixed point either: on lan-guage’s surface – on the flow of signifiers – it slides back and forth between twosimilar points as in Agamben: between the ego and the Other.17 In pursuit of itsreal self, the subject will find this only in its non-appropriable desubjectivation,i.e. as constitutively alienated in the Other. All this shows the tragic condition wehumans are in. And what is more: here, the logic of inclusive exclusion – read:of sovereignty – is one of representation. Mourning for the real – for bare life –does not invite the real’s rehabilitation, but simply expresses the condition inwhich we have to deal with it, i.e, as representation. In other words, the logic inwhich Agamben operates here is the representationalist one he rejects.

So, it might be not a mere coincidence when Agamben, using the logic of inclu-sive exclusion to characterize the subject, explicitly does not mention it. If hehad done so, his conclusion could only have been that the logic of sovereigntyis the logic of the subject tout court and, thus, that representationalist logic re-mains the one and only with which we have to handle the problems inherent tothe universal bio-politics we are in. Arrived at that point in his argumentation, he

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17 Or more exactly, in Lacan, these points have been doubled and form the four points of theGraphe of desire (elaborated in the 5th [Les formation de l’inconscient, 1957/8] and 6th seminar (Ledésir et son interpretation, 1958/9], and summarised in “La subversion du sujet”, in J. Lacan[1966], Écrits, pp. 793-827).


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briefly and between brackets refers to Derrida, adds his comment on the tragiccondition, and closes the paragraph.

(It is hardly astonishing that it was precisely from an analysis of the pronoun “I” inHusserl that Derrida was able to draw his idea an infinite deferral [différance]18, anoriginary disjunction – writing – inscribed in the pure self-presence of conscious-ness.) [RA 123]

Again, one can ask whether the reference to Derrida is not brief and betweenbrackets precisely because the logic used there is representationalist. In a Der-ridian perspective, there is no real alternative for the representationalist logic.“There is no outside of the text” is an injunction not to get beyond the text, toendlessly deconstruct that text from within.19 This is definitely not Agamben’soption. In the next paragraph, he comes up with his real theory, which in a wayis the theory of the real – the real subject as well as real life.

His reference now is Ludwig Binswanger’s essay “The Vital Function and the in-ternal history of life” (1928), allowing him to leave the logic of inclusive exclu-sion and, thus, the one of representation. In that essay, Binswanger replaces theold dichotomy “psychic” versus “somatic” by “functional modality of the psy-cho-somatic organism” versus “the internal history of life”, the former func-tioning while sleeping and dreaming, the latter while being awake. The subjectwill not be conceived as excluded from that “life”, but rather as what emerges inbetween the two functions, the vital one and the “historical” one, i.e. the one oflanguage.

Where, and how, can a subject be introduced into the biological flow? Is it possible tosay that at the point in which the speaker, saying “I”, is produced as subject, there issomething like a coincidence between these two series, in which the speaking subjectcan truly assume his biological functions as his own, in which the living being canidentify himself with the speaking and thinking “I”? In the cyclical development ofbodily processes as in the series of consciousness’ intentional acts, nothing seems toconsent to such a coincidence. Indeed, “I” signifies precisely the irreducible dis-junction between vital functions and inner history, between the living being’s be-

MARC DE KESEL

19 “Il n’y pas de hors-texte”, see: Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri ChakravortySpivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), p.158.


coming a speaking being, and the speaking being’s sensation of itself as living. It iscertainly true that the two series flow alongside one another, in what one could callabsolute intimacy. But is intimacy not the name that we give to a proximity that alsoremains distant, to a proximity that never becomes identity? (RA 124-125)

Is the subject simply an element in the “biological flux”? Not at all. If not ex-cluded, it is at least separated from it. Or, more exactly is it not the subject thatis separated from the “biological flux”; it is the history and the language makingthe subject possible. And is, then, the subject to be defined as the point where thebiological and the “historical”, the vital and the discursive join one another? Notexactly. It is the place where the two series get separated. The subject is that sep-aration and the “intimacy” of the two series in that separating zone.

The logic here is not without reminiscence to the “logic of the sense” GillesDeleuze develops in his 1969 book of the same name.20 It is a logic of “differenceand repetition” taking place upon – and, more exactly, in between – “series”.Coupled series: a corporeal and an incorporeal one, “bodily processes” and “con-sciousness’ intentional acts”, living and speaking, life and language. These se-ries are disconnected from one another and, precisely by means of thatdisconnection, in relation with one another. And, so Agamben states, the subjectis in between, as a fluctuating process at the same time separating and combin-ing the two series. Or, more exactly, the subject is the witness, the testimony ofthat disconnection.

If there is no articulation between the living being and language, if the “I” stands sus-pended in this disjunction, there can be testimony. The intimacy that betrays our non-coincidence with ourselves, is the place of testimony. Testimony takes place in thenon-place of articulation. (RA 130)

In the same way, the witness of Auschwitz keeps “living” and “surviving”, i.e.human life and its vegetally surviving “rest”, separated from one another.

The witness attests to the fact that there can be testimony because there is an insep-arable division and non-coincidence between the inhuman and the human, the living

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20 Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1969). See especially the “se-ries” on language” (pp. 212–215).


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being and the speaking being, the Muselmann and the survivor. […] its authority de-pends not on the factual truth, a conformity between something said and a fact or be-tween memory and what happened, but rather on the immemorial relation betweenthe unsayable and the sayable, between the outside and the inside of language. Theauthority to speak consists in his capacity to speak solely in the name of an incapacityto speak – i.e. in his or her being a subject. (RA 157-158; Agamben underlines)

The witness – not the one bearing witness, but the witness as such – speaks inthe name of an incapacity to speak. This is why it defines the subject, which al-ways is the subject of an desubjectification, of a process between the one whospeaks but has nothing to say, and the mute who is the only who has somethingto say. On the one side the Muselmann, the non-human, the de-humanised anddesubjectified one; on the other side the human, the survivor, the one who hasregained his humanity, his subjectivity. Only the latter can speak, and what hegives voice to is the silenced Muselmann. The survivor gives “ground” or “subject”to the radically desubjectified. In his testimony he has to affirm that, being in asense the subject/bearer of that witness, in another, more real sense, that sub-ject/bearer is somewhere else, in the desubjectified Muselmann, and, thus, in hisown desubjectivation.

And on what ground such testimony and its subject are possible? Agamben’s ul-timate answer, here, is life. What enables a testimony is the fact that, inAuschwitz, the Muselmann “survived”, not in the human, but in the non-humansense: reduced to bare life, he lived the vegetal life of sheer surviving, the vital“zero degree” that rests when someone’s life is completely deprived from itshuman dimension. Life’s vitality, even in the most deadly situation, the creativedifference that incessantly separates life from the form it has taken and stimu-lates it again and again to new forms-of-life (hyphenated): this is what enablesthe witness to let the non-human (the Muselmann) speak in his testimony. Thisis what enables the “barely speaking” of the witness, i.e. a speaking giving voiceto mute bare life. It is the foundation of Agamben’s testimony and subject theory,and of the entire “positive” side of his thought.

However, is this an adequate alternative for the evil logic analysed in the “nega-tive”, critical part of his oeuvre? Is Agamben’s vitalistic ontology delivered fromand immune to the grammar of inclusive exclusion, characteristic for the logic ofsovereignty? Does the witness avoid that trap? Let us once again, with the wit-

MARC DE KESEL


ness, enter “into a vertiginous movement” that makes him speak what thespeechless has to say, as tells one of the passages cited above:

Testimony takes place where the speechless one makes the speaking one speak, andwhere the one who speaks bears the impossibility of speaking in his own speech, suchthat the silent and speaking, the inhuman and the human enter in a zone of indis-tinction in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the“imagined substance” of the “I”, and, along with it, the true witness. (RA 120-121)

Given that it is true that, in the testimonial “place”, there is no “‘imagined sub-stance’ of the ‘I’”, does this necessarily imply that the logic of inclusive exclusionis absent there? Present any way is the “zone of indistinction”, the proper domainof the logic of sovereignty. And does that “zone” not invite , or maybe even requirea sovereign decision? Of course, the speaker’s speaking tells what the speechlesshas to say and his witness does not reduce the victim to bear life. But is he not inthe position he could have done this? Could he not have preferred not to bear wit-ness and to let the Muselmann’s bare life bare and mute? Is, according to Agamben,the speaker’s “potentiality not to” not essential in his potentiality to witness, justlike the “potentiality not to” is precisely the one that makes “what rests ofAuschwitz” – the non-life of the Muselmann – a “surviving” one? And so, does thesituation in which “the speechless one makes the speaking one speak” not supposea decision of the speaker allowing the speechless to make him speak, a decisionthat cannot but be sovereign, since the place in which it is taken is a “zone of in-distinction”? And of course, in this case, the speaker takes the decision not to bethe sovereign, not to play the game of the “‘imagined substance’ of the ‘I’”, but tofully recognize his own desubjectification, thus giving voice to the Muselmann’sdesubjectification and to the “life” that “rested” in him even in Auschwitz, a restthat makes giving witness of Auschwitz possible. But is all this not based on a sov-ereign decision that excludes the proper voice of the Muselmann, declaring it isnot possible to include him in the realm dominated by the speaker’s “I”, in orderto, in that quality, be included in the testimony? The repeated emphasis on the dis-tance to be kept between the human and non-human, the one giving witness andthe “complete witness”, the survivor and the Muselmann: is this not all too similarto the inclusive exclusion logic to be a convincing alternative for the logic of sov-ereignty? Certainly, even if it is sovereign, the decision of the survivor’s witness iscontrary to the one the Nazi’s took on the level of content, but on a merely formallevel, it is as sovereign.

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Agamben’s thought gives us an interesting set of tools and references to criticallyanalyse the logic of sovereignty haunting even the best intentions of Westernbiopolitics. But does his vitalist ontology provide an adequate alternative for thatlogic? As far as my reading reaches, and as far as his publications allow it (since the“pars construens” of his Homo Sacer project is still to be published), my answer tothis question must be negative. In his passages on language, his provocative analy-sis detecting everywhere the logic of sovereignty shows its most radical implica-tions. But the passages on language in which Agamben develops his alternativelogic (for instance the ones on bearing witness), do not really seem to go beyondthe logic of sorvereignty, I must conclude. At least they give no adequate answer tothe representationalist way of treating the same problems which says that the logicof sovereignty – of inclusive exclusion – is the logic we have to deal with even tofind solutions for the disaster that logic has provoked and is still able to provoke.

7. (Coda)

In addition to the three mottos at the opening of the Italian (as well as the French)edition of Homo sacer, the English translation adds a fourth one: “And the com-mandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death” (HS ix). One canwonder why, unlike the three others, here, no author is mentioned. Is it becausethat sentence, and the entire chapter 7 in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans ofwhich it is taken, reveals too clearly the formal messianic scheme of Agamben’sthought?

In this (famous) chapter 7, Paul analyses ruthlessly the impasse of the basic fantasyunderlying Jewish monotheism: God’s Law (or “commandment”) that once prom-ised life (i.e. a restored relation with God) ended up to bring only sin and death, soPaul argues there. His analysis is striking if only because, in its way, it develops atheory of the split subject, surprisingly comprehensible for the late moderns weare. (“For the good that I would do, I do not; but the evil which I would not do,that I do; Rom.7: 19.)21 And why, in this chapter, Paul’s analysis can be so merciless,so implacable? Because he has already the solution in mind, which is Christ. Allcan be doomed to death, for the redemption of death has occurred already in Christ

MARC DE KESEL

21 Think for instance of the way Jacques Lacan affirmatively quotes a substantial part of Rom.7 in his seminar on ethics; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psycho-analysis, 1959-1960, translated with notes by Dennis Porter (London & New York: Routledge,1992), p. 83


(“O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Ithank God – through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself servethe law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” Rom.7: 24-25).

Formally, a similar structure characterises Agamben’s critical gesture. The prom-ise of life (inherent to any kind of biopolitics) puts us in the position of sovereignpower’s deadly victims. The way we think of – and deal with – life, the way wesuppose life to be the foundation of the political, is doomed to (virtually) bring usall into a death camp. Agamben’s analysis is ruthless: nothing escapes the inclu-sively exclusive logic of sovereignty. But why can his analysis be so merciless? Whatenables him to say that nothing escapes the ruses of that deadly logic, not evenlanguage itself? The answer to that question is that he has the definite redemptionalready in mind: a non-representationalist, ontological logic, or, even more pre-cise, a vitalist ontology will save us from the logic of sovereignty. Not a New Cre-ation, as was the core of the Paulinian message, but a new way to relate to reality,a new logic, will save us from the universal state of sin the representationalist logichas brought the world into. Once this new logic will be generally accepted, Agam-ben’s critical analyses will become a senseless gesture.

One can wonder why Agamben does not consider his own critical gesture pre-cisely as a “gesture”. For, he himself defines “gesture”, for instance with a refer-ence to Stéphane Mallarmée, as that what is kept “suspended ‘entre le désir etl’accomplissement, la perpétration et son souvenir” (between desire and fulfil-ment, perpetration and its recollection)”, so he writes in Meanings without end(MWE 58). Criticism, he explains, is not to be considered as a means leading tosome end (to a radically new way to thinking, for instance), but as a “means with-out end”, as a thinking not relying on the dreamed alternative but tarrying in thepostponement of it, in “the exhibition of a mediality”. Criticism as a “process ofmaking means visible as such” (MWE 58). In the case of Agamben, this wouldmean: a process of making visible the criticisable sovereign logic as such, with-out referring to the alternative logic dreamed of.

As he defines “gesture” as what shows “the being-in-language as pure mediality”(MWE 59), Agamben could have defined his own thought as, so to say, “being-in-criticism as pure mediality”. It would have been at the expense of the messianicpathos of his writings, but it would have benefited the realism of his criticalthought.

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